THE BEEF TRUST LIVES The Beef Trust Lives:
Infectious diseases and wage slavery in the American Packinghouse at the turns of the
centuries
Jennifer DH Walthall
Introduction to Epidemiology P517
For You, O Democracy
Walt Whitman
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
From the cover of the first issue of Comrade 1901
Died of tuberculosis 1892
1 THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 2 Packingtown 1911
Problem Statement
Meatpacking has one of the highest morbidities of any American industrial occupation.
Meatpackers in both the early 20th and 21st centuries faced perils of life and limb that were
sustained even when other industry standards revolutionized worker safety3. Upton Sinclair’s
novel The Jungle focused an ongoing public outcry that resulted in The Pure Food and Drug Act
of 1906 and the developed world’s obsession with “clean food.” The irony of these important
changes in food inspection and safety standards is that they were geared toward the food itself,
without regard for the condition of the workforce involved. The infectious disease and injury
risk to meatpacking employees continues despite a century of oversight and regulation. This
paper will compare and contrast early 20th and 21st century disease epidemiology associated with
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 3 the American abattoir in the context of the socio-political climate of an immigrant work force,
wage slavery, and government regulation.
Introduction
“With the touch of an artist, with the sincerity of a Harriet Beecher Stowe, with the realism of
Zola, with the conviction of a Tolstoy, he will picture, as never before, the modern system which
breaks the human heart and turns the life-blood of the toilers of the world into dollars. He can
do it because he is a Socialist. No one else can. And it will hasten the day of the social
revolution.”
Fred Warren, commissioning the writing of The Jungle
Upton Sinclair was a troubled, yet ambitious young American writer who grew up in
relative poverty on the East Coast in the late19th century. He aspired to write “The Great
American Novel” despite a string of literary failures. Following a harsh New Jersey winter
where his young son nearly perished from pneumonia, Upton Sinclair decided upon the
“literature of exposure” that characterized the social ills writing of many contemporary novelists,
including Jack London (The People of the Abyss 1903) and later Theodore Dreiser (An
American Tragedy 1925)22. London used the same tactic to share experiences with his
characters, changing his clothes to “rags and tatters and mixing with the people” who were to be
the subjects of his writing. Sinclair and London “shared an abiding faith in the power of
empirical investigation and blunt exposition of “the facts” to produce reform in a democratic
society22.” Mr. Sinclair became an active Socialist in his early twenties, fostered by his
friendships with literary and political figures at the heart of the progressive movement. He used
his own personal difficult life experiences to frame and bring to life characters that would be the
voices of his perceived social ills. He set off in the fall of 1904 to live for seven weeks in the
stockyards of Chicago, interviewing meatpackers and touring the factories themselves for
material that he hoped would call the great American worker to freedom. The rising socialist
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 4 literary and political circles on the east coast welcomed the passionate and exaggerated “bloods
and guts” writing of Upton Sinclair and offered him an advance on his novel, though after its
completion, the manuscript was declined by five different publishing houses before finding its
way to the general public and even the office of the President Roosevelt through Doubleday
Publishing22.
Conditions
The Jungle describes in gruesome detail the environment of the Chicago stockyards, both
for the animals brought there for slaughter (mostly cattle and swine) and the prominently
immigrant labor force. Basic sanitary conditions are lacking: floors running with blood, ill,
injured or dead cattle (“downers”) are used for food, and sewage filled drains are cleaned
monthly and then added back into “potted meat.” Protective wear was absent and the pace of the
line was break-neck, resulting in life and limb threatening injuries as a routine matter of course.
One of the more graphic scenes describes a worker falling into a rendering vat until only his
skeleton remained, his body becoming part of lard to be sold to the public28. Though Sinclair
only personally visited the stockyards three times during his seven week stay in Chicago, he
verifies his interview accounts in his personal letters and records31. Inspectors sent secretly by
the Neill-Reynolds commission through President Theodore Roosevelt independently confirmed
the despicable surroundings he observed30. Of note, the owners of the plants had a warning of
this commission visit three weeks in advance and spent that time in around the clock upgrades
and repairs. The Neill-Reynolds report, a scathing condemnation of the industry state of affairs,
which was not released to the public, reflects these “post” conditions rather than those described
in The Jungle. Neill testified of the conditions before Congress in support of Sinclair’s
findings22.
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 5 The societal response to The Jungle was to make it a bestselling novel and to focus on
improving the quality of meat product delivered to the American public. Upton Sinclair
famously states, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Labor
Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds reported back to
President Roosevelt, who was forced to make a measured response to their findings. He
interviewed Upton Sinclair and found him to be “hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful” but his
findings difficult to completely refute and impossible to suppress22. Though not a socialist
sympathizer, President Roosevelt released small portions of the Neill-Reynolds report and
recommended government oversight into the meat processing industry. The policy generated
from this process included the Meat Inspection Act, The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and
the creation of The Bureau of Chemistry, which became the FDA in 1930. The Pure Food and
Drug Act passed a mere five months after the publication of the novel. Upton Sinclair himself
was not pleased with the legislation, as it put the financial burden for assuring safety on the U.S.
Government rather than the packing industry29.
Moving forward through a century of “improvement” in meat quality and food inspection
through these historic efforts, one will discover a shocking 2008 headline that could have been
written by Upton Sinclair himself: “Investigative Update: Cruelty at California Slaughter
Plant.1” Following an account on the continued use of “downers” in California beef packing
plants, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Packing Company president appeared before Congress in an
eerily similar replay of the events in 1906. In February 2008, the largest beef recall in US
history of greater than 143 million pounds of beef occurred due to a loophole in the USDA
regulations that permitted sick and injured cattle to be used in commercial meat. The loophole
involved the practice of violently forcing an animal to its feet long enough to pass inspection.
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 6 The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) filed suit against the USDA and graphically
demonstrated via videotaping the treatment of these animals in the Chino, California
slaughterhouse. They also reported that animals of this condition were mostly fed to
schoolchildren through school lunch programs in 40 states, a detail that would have made Upton
Sinclair proud. “Downer” cattle are at higher risk for bovine spongiform encephalopathy and
other food borne pathogens, which led to the USDA ruling to keep these cattle out of food
production in 20041. However, this emergency measure was reversed covertly in 2007 to permit
some crippled cows to be slaughtered for human consumption. The Hallmark/Westland Meat
Packing Company permanently closed in late February 2008 and three of its workers were
charged with felony and misdemeanor counts for cruelty. Of note, the USDA had five inspectors
assigned to the Chino plant, yet it took an undercover HSUS worker to report the abuses.
President Obama made a complete ban against downer cattle use in March 2009. No attention to
working conditions was given, nor to the fact that those charged with animal cruelty had no
formal training in humane practices and two of the three were not US citizens who will be
deported after serving jail time.
Wage slavery: then and now
The heart of Upton Sinclair’s message in The Jungle was the plight of the unskilled
American laborer in capitalist society at the turn of the century. He was repulsed yet fascinated
by opulent wealth and sought social measures to narrow the gap between the hopeless and dying
urban poor and the small subset of society that profited from their sorrows32. His choice of
Jurgis Rudkus as the protagonist was not accidental; the workforce he moved among in the Back
of the Yards/Packingtown in 1905 was predominantly immigrant, unskilled, and without
financial resources. In a society designed to exploit the innocent, including women, children,
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 7 and foreign born, the ability to “get ahead” in the context of a back breaking and unreliable
packer job was nearly impossible without resorting to graft and criminal activity. Cheap labor
was described as “wage slavery” in this era, comparing the conditions of living from moment to
moment as worse than the recently freed slaves of the South. The Beef Trust, built of Durham,
Brown, and Jones Meat Packing Companies, (euphemisms for Armour, Swift, and Morris) kept
their employees in constant want with little hope of advancement15.
The early twentieth century meatpacker wage slave worked in an urban setting with
crowded conditions and poor public health. Social programs began to evolve to provide
resources, including the famous University of Chicago Settlement in Packingtown. Run by Mary
E. McDowell, the Settlement sought to “promote child and adult education, improve working
conditions, and help immigrants assimilate effectively into American life.2” Ms. McDowell
fought vigorously to keep the Settlement separate from the University of Chicago proper, likely
due to the fact that Swift and Company, a member of the Beef Trust, was one of the University’s
largest contributors. Upton Sinclair himself ate his meals at the Settlement House and conducted
many of his interviews there during his seven weeks of research in situ22.
Wage slavery and meatpacking risk continues in the United States, but with an
evolutionary change in the location and ethnicity of the worker over the intervening century.
The packinghouse, or abattoir, is now situated in rural America. It is in Postville, IA instead of
Chicago, IL. It is free from high density oversight and inspectors. It escapes public notice and
provides few social resources23. The dominant labor force is immigrant, but instead of Eastern
European, they are Central American, Laotian, and Vietnamese. A 2008 Immigration and
Customs raid in a northeast Iowa meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors, resulted in more than 300
Guatemalan workers’ deportation (697 workers out of the total 968 employees were immigrants).
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 8 The city of Postville, IA lost a full 1/3 of its population in 48 hours4. Given their language
barriers and lack of formal organization, immigrant meatpackers are subject to many systematic
human rights violations ranging from inability to use the restroom during the day (several reports
from abattoirs in Nebraska describe employees that are required to urinate or defecate on
themselves while on the line and remain in soiled clothing) to being deported and charged with
identity theft for working undocumented4,26.
Injury and Illness
The risk of injury among this workforce leads all other industries44,45. Stanley Lebergott
asserted that the number of fatalities per dollar of GNP for overall United States workers
dropped by 96 percent between 1900 and 1979. The percentage of common laborers in the U.S.
workforce fell from 30 percent to 5 percent between 1900 and 199047. Despite these two global
advances, the meatpacker is specifically at risk of injury the younger and the newer on the job
they are42. The rate of injury for meatpacking is three times that of any other industry44, even
with gross suspected underreporting5. Underreporting is not confined to immigrant workers, as
demonstrated in Table 3, where there is no statistically significant difference between reporting
in immigrant abattoir workers. However, lack of citizenship allows the injured to be denied
compensation for injuries, whether reported or not5.
Table 1: Calculations of meatpacking injury risk rates 200942
Total Population of employees 499,700
Number of total injuries 35,300
Number of cases with days away from work: 5,600
*Crude Injury rate 2009: 35,300/499,700 = 70.6 per 1,000 population
Number of injuries in 1st 30 days: 319 (1985)
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 9 Table 2: Calculations of injury risk rates 190925,36
Total Population of employees (Swift and Company): estimated at 21,000
Swift and Company injuries first 6 months of 1909: 3,500
*Crude Injury rate 1909: 3,500/21,000 = 166.6 injuries per 1,000 population
*author calculations
Of note, the calculation of these rates of injury is difficult for 1905, as Royal Meeker’s
assumption of the role of Commissioner of Labor Statistics in 1913 was directly responsible for
the public airing of labor statistics “to turn the searching light of publicity into the farthest and
darkest corners of industry, to make known the successes of enlightened policies of dealing with
labor, to show up wrongdoers, whether they be employers of workers or workers of employers.6”
In addition, the records of Swift and Company are not available for public viewing.
Table 3: Immigrant injury reporting Human Rights Watch interviews5
Immigrant
Yes
No
Total
*Case control study: OR reporting
injury immigrant vs. American = 1.1
95% CI {.3864, 3.398} so results are
not statistically significant
*Author
calculations
Injury reported
Yes
11
24
35
No
8
20
28
Total
19
22
63
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 10 Tuberculosis in Packingtown: a measure of the quality of working-class life
“Viewed from the standpoint of money loss alone--$5000 being the amount a human life is
valued at in Illinois—all the expenses for maintenance of our great government are not to be
compared with the financial loss sustained by the nation from tuberculosis.”
Homer M Thomas, MD at The Symposium on Tuberculosis 1899
“The poor old man was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the end, he never
could get up again. He would lie there and cough and cough, day and night, wasting away to a
mere skeleton. And one night he had a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his
mouth. …while three more hemorrhages came; and then at last one morning they found him stiff
and cold.”
Account of Antanas’ death from consumption The Jungle
Tuberculosis, also known as “consumption,” was ever present in urban society at the turn
of the century. As population density increased, so did the disease. Though Koch had isolated a
specific organism in 1882, even he was unsure about specifics of transmissibility and the
relationship of human and animal forms of tuberculosis, which were differentiated in 189812,16.
The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica states a 15-17% incidence of tuberculous cows and oxen in
developed countries’ slaughterhouses. According to this archived encyclopedia, the British
government put together a commission to investigate Koch’s 1901 assertion that the bovine and
human tubercle bacillus were different organisms and possibly not transmissible. The 1907
commission report states: “The human and bovine bacilli belong to the same family. On this
view the answer to the question, ‘Can the bovine bacillus affect man?’ is obviously in the
affirmative. The same answer must also be given to those who hold the theory that human and
bovine tubercle bacilli are different in kind, since the bovine kind are readily to be found as the
causal agents of many fatal cases of human tuberculosis.”16
A Symposium on Tuberculosis in 1899, reported by N.S. Davis in The Lancet, makes an
international plea to study the conditions predisposing populations to consumption rather than
focus only on the tubercle bacillus. He described the absurdity of measures being used at the
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 11 time to contain the spread of TB: “the unfortunate consumptive began to be avoided as far as
possible…some genius proposed having all the members of the community wear antiseptic gauze
over the mouth and nostrils…destroying all tuberculous cattle so as to prevent the infecting
bacillus from coming in our meat and milk.7” These measures are remarkably similar to modern
disease control measures: isolation, N-95 masks, and animal inspection. The conclusion of the
Symposium stated: “the correct inference is that the natural vital resistance, when in full vigor, is
sufficient to render the human body immune to its attacks.” They suggested that selecting a
more healthy population free of poverty and “persistent depressing mental emotions” is the more
effective means to prevent the spread of TB7. It is perhaps this pivotal historical moment that
stalled Koch’s momentum: the diagnostic PPD skin test was not developed until 1931.
Antibiotic therapy did not begin until 194716. Of note, Koch won the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his
work with tuberculosis, just under one year before the publication of The Jungle, where the nonmedical, non-scientist Upton Sinclair described the causal web of conditions that predisposed the
meatpacker to unprecedented rates of disease.
Packingtown, in the 29th district of Chicago, was documented with the highest prevalence
of tuberculosis in the city of Chicago and, according to Dr. Caroline Hedger, perhaps the entire
United States during the first decade of the 20th century10. The conditions that made this possible
were three-fold: 1) population density, 2) absence of sanitation infrastructure, and 3) exposure to
animal-borne tuberculosis. Though the first two elements are easily identifiable, the third is a
horrifying and potentially logarithmic risk factor. Upton Sinclair described in his letters
personally watching designated TB inspectors engage in conversation with union bosses while
cattle carcasses “bloated with consumption” passed by31. In addition, he asserted that cattle with
TB were often selected because they were larger than healthy cattle due to excess bloat weight28.
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 12 A recent study suggested that even vigilant visual inspection is not sufficient screening in highrisk animal populations, making irregular visual inspected far less than an honorable industry
standard38. The close and unsanitary working conditions of the abattoir environment put the
packinghouse worker in contact with airborne TB from carcass processing and each other every
single day they came to work.8
Dr. Hedger was appointed to a special Chicago committee in 1905 in order to determine
the cause of high rates of tuberculosis specific to Packingtown. Her careful mapping of the
stockyards located “special streets and special houses where the disease prevailed in such an
abnormal manner as to show that the dwellings themselves were absolutely unhealthy and
dangerous.10” She found, however, that these homes were not overcrowded compared to other
areas of the city, nor were they unclean. She erroneously concluded that the diet of Packingtown
residents predisposed them to anemia, and therefore TB. Dr. Adolph Smith, a turn of the century
epidemiologist and correspondent to The Lancet, took her data to a more logical conclusion:
“Therefore, if the homes are better and nevertheless the death-rate is higher, then it is the
character of the work which does the harm.10” He stated that the working conditions he found in
Chicago packinghouses were specifically to blame for the prevalence of TB in this area. Despite
the changes to public policy affecting the meat industry after 1906, Dr. Smith was shocked at the
state of the packinghouse he found on his follow-up visit to Chicago in 1909, where he declared
minimal progress made in the conditions there for human and animal alike.13,14
The following calculations of tuberculosis illness and death rates in Chicago and
Packingtown rely heavily on the work of students enrolled at the University of Chicago from
1902 to 1905 who canvassed the streets of Packingtown doing epidemiologic research on the
“culture of disorganization” and the informal Packingtown census commissioned by the U.S.
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 13 Commissioner of Labor Ethelbert Stewart in 1905. These documents are contained in copied
form at the Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois. In addition, Dr. Adolph Smith
contributed a series of journal articles in The Lancet that became immortalized in Upton
Sinclair’s serial article “Is Chicago Meat Clean?” in the magazine Collier’s8-11. He depicted
Chicago from the viewpoint of a European physician and provided statistical information
unavailable from other sources.
Table 4: Comparative Death Rates Tuberculosis17,36,10
Packingtown
(1905) 252,980
(1908) 4,290
(1908) 1287
(1908) 16.9 per 1,000
Compare 1905 Dr.
Smith 17.76 per 1,000
(1908) 5.1 per 1,000
population
1287/4290 = 30%
Total population
Total deaths
TB deaths
*Crude death rate
*TB death rate
*PMR
Chicago
(1903) 1,873,880
(1907) 31,358
(1907) 5,956
(1907) 16.7 per 1,000
Compare 1905 Dr.
Smith 15.42 per 1,000
(1907) 3.2 per 1,000
population
5,956/31,358 = 19%
United States
(1905) 45,028,767
(1905) 715,957
(1905) 65,352
(1905) 15.9 per 1,000
(1905) 1.5 per 1,000
population
65,352/715,957=9.1%
TB Deaths
Packingtown
+
totals
*Cross sectional study:
Risk Ratio = 1.601 with
a 95% CI {1.506, 1.7},
so the results are
statistically significant
*author calculations
+
1,287
5,956
7,243
251,693
1,867,924
2,119,617
totals
252,980
1,873,880
2,126,860
Given the above analysis of statistics, the burden of tuberculosis on
Packingtown is not overstated in The Jungle. Upton Sinclair’s
observations, confirmed by a trained medical observer and the
epidemiologists at the University of Chicago, made an informed call
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 14 for the improvement of meatpacking for workers which should have had an impact on quality of
life with respect to work related injury and disease transmission.
Chronic Demyelinating Polyneuropathy in Austin, Minnesota
Moving forward in time to the modern era of workplace safety, clean food, and labor
rights, one may open the same journal that described the tuberculosis risk in Packingtown and
find a new disease risk in the abattoir. The Lancet in January of 2010 published “An Outbreak
of neurological autoimmunity with polyradiculopathy in workers exposed to aerosolized porcine
neural tissue: a descriptive study” which presented the conclusions of a four year long journey of
public health discovery18. The disease was insidious and developed in workers from Minnesota
and Indiana whose common factor was their place of employment in swine processing factories.
The illness consisted of progressive weakness, neuropathic burning pain, headaches and
profound fatigue. Twenty one cases were defined and reported in Austin, Minnesota in 200720.
Following a public call to report further cases, neurologists in Indiana identified three additional
cases from a plant in Delphi, Indiana that were subsequently confirmed by the CDC and
evaluated with the index cases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester21.
The investigation and description of this new disease process, an autoimmune
demyelinating polyneuropathy, is a fascinating bird’s eye view of public health and the risks of
transmissible disease in modern day meatpacking plants. From the index case report to the
discovery of the process of “brain-blowing,” the unraveling of a new meatpacking risk revealed
continued practices straight from Sinclair’s gut-wrenching pages. “Those workers tasked with
‘blowing brains’ would, in rapid succession, insert severed pig heads into a device that
pneumatically blasted the brains out of the skull—each blast sending up a mist of brain matter
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 15 into the surrounding air.19” The aerosolized mist remained in the air to be inhaled by any worker
at the brain processing table, where they were only protected by a short Plexiglas partial wall and
were without facial protection. The process was shut down after the health department
determined the source of exposure, and just like Snow’s closure of the cholera pump, no further
cases emerged. No patients had persistent motor dysfunction after either immunotherapy
(IVIG/steroids) or removal from the exposure, but all of them are left with chronic neuropathic
pain and sensory dysfunction18. 76% of the patients were immigrants, just as is reflected in the
1900 Chicago packing plants30. In fact, a medical Spanish interpreter at the Mayo Clinic named
Carol Hidalgo was credited with making the connection between these patients’ place of
employment and their similar constellation of complaints19.
Table 5: Results The Lancet18
Aerosolized
porcine brain
Exposed
Neurologic
symptoms or
seropositive
Yes
53
Not exposed
Total
Note: +1 added to each cell to account for 0
*Case Control Study: OR of
developing autoimmune
demyelinating polyneuropathy
with exposure to aerosolized
porcine brain: 169.6 with a 95%
CI {22.94, 1253} so the results
are statistically significant
*author calculations
0
53
No
56
Total
109
178
234
178
287
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 16 This autoimmune progressive disease process was determined to be associated with
inhaled porcine brain by several means of inference. The first was that “the incidence of 21
cases in about 500 workers during the reporting period is about 200 times that expected from
chronic inflammatory polyradiculopathy in the this region.21” The baseline rate of this type of
disorder in the general population is 2-5 per 100,000. The second was that when the process was
halted, no further cases were reported and patients did not have a relapse of disease21. The odds
ratio reported above, though not specifically calculated in the article, makes a very strong case
for this exposure/disease relationship.
Figure 1: Case Definition Chronic Demyelinating Polyneuropathy21
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 17 The Beef Trust Lives: Social Justice and Health Policy
The main object at Chicago is profit, which is the difference between civilization and barbarism.
This must be due, I cannot help repeating, to the absence of the sense of dignity which is one of
the worst failings noticeable in America. So long as a thing pays it does not matter what ignoble
expedient may be employed to make it pay. Some of the principle owners of the Chicago
stockyards have confessed that they have more money than they know how to employ.”
Dr. Adolph Smith, 1905
The turn of the century saw the evolution of the Beef Trust (Armour, Swift, and Jones),
propagated by refrigerated cars and railroad networks, mechanization of production, and a
growing market for food domestically and internationally. As this big business increased and
profits soared, labor opportunities for immigrants soared as well30. What then emerged was a
giant chasm between the understanding of the lives of packinghouse workers and the goals of
their employers. The Settlement House at the University of Chicago, headed by Mary
McDowell, sought to bridge this chasm through education and inquiry. She and her colleagues
engaged social scientists to uncover determinants of poverty and disease in the stockyards, then
reported these findings publicly, and ultimately influenced public policy to make meaningful
change2.
Our turn of the century finds the meatpacking industry in a surprisingly similar state.
Four companies (IBP, ConAgra, Excel, and Farmland National Beef) yet again dominate the beef
market at 85% and employ the same immigrant heavy demographic as the Beef Trust of the
1900s. Because margins are slim, these companies are “especially intent on keeping labor costs
as low as possible and volume as high as possible.23” This encourages hiring cheap and
undocumented labor and maintaining high manufacturing speeds, identical to the practices of
Sinclair’s time. In fact, the average earnings of packinghouse workers is approximately 30% less
than the average wage for all manufacturing jobs in the US.26 Today’s social scientists therefore
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 18 have an equally large battle to fight, typified by the report “Blood, Sweat and Tears” from the
group Human Rights Watch.5 This group, an international organization interested in protecting
human rights, published extensive recommendations regarding meat and poultry workers in the
United States in 2005. In March of 2010 the Nebraska Appleseed group published similar
recommendations after a survey of 455 meatpackers across Nebraska46. Many of their
recommendations, if enforced properly, would allow the meatpacking industry to parallel the
increases in safety seen in other manufacturing. The repeal of the OSHA ergonomic workforce
recommendations by President Bush was a huge blow to progress in this area. Slowing down the
carcass lines and mandatory use of universal personal protection could easily decrease
transmission of disease through skin and respiratory penetration. The ability for any worker to
stop a line due to an emergency without retaliation could also increase workplace safety.
Sweeping change to the workplace in this industry, however, seems to be an insurmountable
task27.
Conclusion statement
Upton Sinclair’s most famous literary work continues to resonate in modern society as the
abattoir of 2010 poses dangers to its workforce by means of disease exposure and wage slavery.
The diseases may have different names and the wage slaves a different nationalities, but the
issues of safety for the meatpacker remain. Public policy revision for the protection of the
immigrant worker, for promotion of packing house safety standards, and for enforcement of
responsible industrial food processing remains a priority for not only the stomachs, but also the
hearts of Americans.
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 19 Epilogue:
Upton Sinclair delivered his final public address to over three thousand students at Indiana
University, Bloomington on October 19, 1963. It was titled “Changing America and What Will
Happen to You if You Try.” While engaging an enraptured audience for 90 minutes and never
once referring to his notes, the 85 year old Sinclair begged the next generation of idealists to
keep asking his questions and seeking the social change that had defined his own life and
influenced the lives of countless others.
References:
I am indebted to the committed employees of the Chicago Historical Society for locating a
wealth of data from Packingtown in the 1900s that is otherwise unavailable. I also feel as if I
know Dr. Suk Bong Suh personally from reading his thesis “Literature, Society, and Culture:
Upton Sinclair and The Jungle”, which provided the initial direction for this paper.
1) Humane Society of the United States website “Investigative Update: Cruelty at California
Slaughter Plant.” March 7, 2008
www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/undercover_investigation_update_013008.html.
2) University of Chicago website “The University and the City.”
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/excat/city3.html.
3) Hallgrimsdottir, Helga. “From Wage Slaves to Wage Workers: Cultural Opportunity
Structures and the Evolution of the Wage Demands of the Knights of Labor and the
American Federation of Labor, 1880-1900.” Social Forces. 86(3) 1393-1411. March
2007
4) Freixas, Erik. “Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in US History: A Personal
Account.” Archives of Florida International University. June 13, 2008
5) “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Worker’s Rights in US Meat and Poultry Plants.” Human
Rights Watch. 2005
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 20 6) Goldberg, Joseph. Chapter 4: “Royal Meeker: Statistics in Recession and Wartime.” The
Bureau of Labor and Statistics: The First 100 Years. Newsletter of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. 1985
7) Davis, N.S. “What are the most efficient and practical means for limiting the prevalence
and fatality of pulmonary tuberculosis?” Symposium on Tuberculosis American Medical
Association. JAMA. 712-714. March 24, 1900.
8) Smith, Adolph. “Chicago. The Stockyards and Packing Town; Insanitary Condition of the
World’s Largest Meat Market.” The Lancet. 49-52. January 7, 1905.
9) Smith, Adolph. “Chicago. The Dark and Insanitary Premised Used for the Slaughtering
of Cattle and Hogs.—The Government Inspection.” The Lancet. 120-123. January 14,
1905.
10) Smith, Adolph. “Chicago. Tuberculosis Among the Stockyard Workers.—Sanitation in
Packingtown.—The Police and the Dumping of Refuse.—Vital Statistics.” The Lancet.
183-185. January 21, 1905.
11) Smith, Adolph. “Chicago. Unhealthy Work in the Stockyards.—Shameless Indifference
to the Insanitary Condition of the Buildings and the Cattle Pens.—Pollution of the
Subsoil.—The Need for Legislative Interference.” The Lancet. 258-260. January 28,
1905.
12) “The International Congress of Tuberculosis at Paris.” Special Proceedings. The Lancet.
1280-1284. October 28, 1905.
13) Smith, Adolph. “The Chicago Stockyards Revisited.” The Lancet. 718-721. March 6,
1909
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 21 14) Smith, Adolph. “The Chicago Stockyards Revisited.” The Lancet. 868-872. March 20,
1909.
15) Levin, Leslie A. “One Main’s Meat is Another Man’s Poison: Imagery of
Wholesomeness in the Discourse of Meatpacking from 1900-1910.” Journal of American
and Comparative Cultures. 1-13.
16) “Tuberculosis.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1911.
http://www1911encyclopedia.org/Tuberculosis.
17) 1900 US census www.ancestry.com
18) Lachance, Daniel et al. “An outbreak of neurological autoimmunity with
polyradiculoneuropathy in workers exposed to aerosolized porcine neural tissue: a
descriptive study.” The Lancet Neurology. 9 55-66. January 2010.
19) Smith, Terri. “The Case of the Curious Disease.” Minnesota Monthly. October 2010.
20) “A medical mystery unfolds at Minnesota meatpacking plant.” The New York Times.
February 5, 2008.
21) Holzbauer, Stacy et al. “Epidemiologic Investigation of Immune-Medicated
Polyradiculoneuropathy among Abattoir Workers Exposed to Porcine Brain.” PLoS ONE.
5(3): e9782. March 2008.
22) Suh, Suk Bong. “Literature, Society, and Culture: Upton Sinclair and The Jungle”
Doctoral Thesis. The University of Iowa. 1986.
23) Olsson, Karen. “The Shame of Meatpacking.” The Nation. August 2002.
24) Kandel, William. “Meat-Processing Firms Attract Hispanic Workers.” U.S. Department
of Agriculture Economic Research Service. June 2006.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/June06/Features/MeatProcessing.htm
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 22 25) Swift and Company Press Release. “Swift Celebrates 150 Years Of Meat Industry
Excellence.” June 24, 2005.
26) “Meatpacking in the U.S.: Still a “Jungle” Out There?” www.pbs.org. December 15,
1006
27) Whittaker, William. “Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and Poultry Processing
Industry: An Overview” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress. 1-53.
July 20, 2005.
28) Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. University of Illinois Press. 1988.
29) Barrett, James. “Introduction to The Jungle.” University of Illinois Press. 1988.
30) Barrett, James. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers
1894-1922. University of Illinois Press. 1987.
31) Sinclair, Upton. My Life in Letters. University of Missouri Press. 1960.
32) Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent. Random House. 2006.
33) Mattson, Kevin. Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. John Wiley and Sons.
2006.
34) Report of the Joint Committee on Tuberculin Test. Reprinted by the Illinois State Board
of health. 1911. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015069437229
35) Illinois State Board of Health, Monthly Bulletin. (4). 1908.
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015069437054.
36) Chicago Historical Society Archives. Packingtown census commissioned by the U.S.
Commissioner of Labor Ethelbert Stewart. 1905. McDowell papers “Beginnings.”
“Report of the 1918 Community Study.” These documents are contained in copied form at
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 23 the Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois. Personal phone interview September 24,
2010.
37) Dublin, Louis. Causes of Death by occupation: Occupational mortality experience of the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Industrial Department, 1911-1913. Washington.
1917.
38) Rapsch, C et al. “Estimating the true prevalence of Fasciola hepatica in cattle slaughtered
in Switzerland in the absence of an absolute diagnostic test.” International Journal for
Parasitology. 36(10-11). 1153-8. September 2006.
39) Edwards, JF. “Bacteriologic culture and histologic examination of samples collected from
recumbent cattle at slaughter.” Journal of the American Veterinary medical Association.
207(9). 1174-6. November 1, 1995.
40) Robinson, P. “Mycobacterium bovis as an occupational hazard in abattoir workers.”
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Medicine. 18(5). 701-3, August 1988.
41) Hedger, Caroline. “The Unhealthfulness of Packingtown.” Worlds Work. (12). May
1906.
42) Bureau of Labor and Statistics, Workplace Injuries and Statistics 2009.
43) “Safety in the Meat and Poultry Industry, While Improving, Could Be Further
Strengthened.” U.S. Government Accountability Office. January 12, 2005.
44) Safety and Health Guide for the Meatpacking Industry, U.S. Department of Labor,
Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 1988, OSHA 3108.
45) Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. "Industries with the Highest
Nonfatal Total Cases, Incidence Rates for Injuries and Illnesses, Private Industry, 1998."
U.S. Department of Labor. 1999.
THE BEEF TRUST LIVES 46) “The Speed Kills You: The voice of Nebraska meatpacking workers.” Nebraska
Appleseed 2009.
47) Lebergott, Stanley. “Wages and Working Conditions.” The Concise Encyclopedia of
Economics. 1984.
48) Sinclair, Upton. “Is Chicago Meat Clean?” Collier’s. 13-14. April 22, 1905.
24